00:00:00
Welcome. Today uh I'm very excited for this all-in interview with this week's Nobel laureate, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2025, John Martinez.
00:00:12
John, welcome to the all-in interview. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. Um I'm quite excited about this uh this talk
00:00:19
and uh you know, love to explain to people about you know, what this prize is all about.
00:00:25
All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for
00:00:31
hours. Absolutely. Oh, he crushed your questions in a minute. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What did
00:00:38
you guys think? That was fun. That was great. [Music] Well, the Nobel Prize is the most prestigious honor and particularly in physics that I think can be awarded.
00:00:49
You're in the record books. It's going to be an incredible ceremony coming up for you. Maybe we could go back to the
00:00:55
beginning in your history. I'd love to hear a little bit about, you know, where did you grow up and how did you get started with your interest in physics?
00:01:03
Uh, well, so I uh I grew up in San Pedro, California, and uh, you know, grew up there my whole time. My my father was a fireman and my mom stayed
00:01:15
at home, took care of us, and um, you know, through the years I was always interested in science, technology. I'm going to say one of the things is, you know, my my dad, you know, actually
00:01:27
didn't have a high school education, but very smart person. He was always building things in the garage, various
00:01:33
projects. So, I grew up kind of knowing how to build things, which also kind of tells you how things work, you know,
00:01:40
kind of empirical view, you know, tactical view of how physics works. So uh when I took physics in high school, I actually loved it because there was actually some math behind it and
00:01:52
concepts and you know really made sense to me and uh you know I I just really you know fell in love with the subject and then went to UC Berkeley and and did pretty well there and enjoyed it. Uh
00:02:05
enjoyed it a lot. And then in my senior year at UC Berkeley I had a class from John Clark who was my adviser and found out what he was doing. and he was just
00:02:15
starting to look at these quantum mechanics and electrical devices stuff and it sounded really interesting for me. I guess I have, you know, I guess I
00:02:26
could see maybe when something maybe would would take off. So I started to to uh to to do the graduate school work
00:02:34
with him. You went to Berkeley for graduate school. I went to Gertie for graduate school, which you're not supposed to do.
00:02:39
I was originally a physics and math undergrad at Cal. Okay. I changed my major later and
00:02:45
actually got my degree in astrophysics. There was some upper division math class that really turned me off to math as a
00:02:51
major. There was just so many proofs. It drove me nuts. Right. Right. And then physics was always exciting,
00:02:57
but I liked uh working in the astro lab and I worked actually at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
00:03:03
Oh, okay. Yeah. But then you you stayed at Berkeley and went to grad school, right? Yeah, I stayed at Berkeley, went to grad school. We started this project a couple
00:03:11
years into grad school. I forget exact date. And what was interesting is this was a question that was actually posed by professor Anthony Leget who won the
00:03:22
Nobel Prize for you know helium 3 you know physics uh in I think 20 2003 was that super fluid super fluid helium 3. Yeah that's right. So he showed like if you put helium 3
00:03:34
cold enough it kind of almost has this new sort of characteristic with the physics and how it moves and how it
00:03:40
works. Well, it has a this super fluid behavior, but it has a very complicated behavior because of the more complicated nuclei of the helium 3. And
00:03:50
this had been discovered and people worked for a while to figure that out. And he, you know, helped develop the
00:03:56
theory for that. So, he was quite wellknown, very, very smart person. And although he won the Nobel Prize for that, okay, there's not much helium 3
00:04:08
physics going on, but for the question that led to our experiment, okay, there's a huge field. And the question was, do macroscopic
00:04:19
objects behave quantum mechanically? Okay, and this is a macroscopic object might be a small ball. In our case, it's an electrical circuit with billions of electrons in it, billions of atom and is
00:04:33
the collective motion of say the ball uh quantum mechanical. Now, you know, if you think about throwing throwing a ball against the wall, it's going to bounce off. But if you make the wall thin
00:04:44
enough and the ball light enough, it'll then every once in a while tunnel through because of the, you know, laws
00:04:51
of quantum mechanics. So, um hold on, let's just pause on that for a second. And I think that's really worth
00:04:56
spending a moment on. Yeah. Great. So when we talk about quantum mechanics, when we talk about the relative position or energy or movement of a particle at
00:05:10
the atomic scale as small as an atom or smaller than an atom, we have to use kind of probabilities to describe where things are going to be. That was what was really kind of the big understanding
00:05:22
of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, right? is that there's the probability of things being where
00:05:28
they are and moving as they're moving there. It's not like like deterministic like we can see with the ball that we
00:05:35
throw around. When you get very very small things get very fuzzy and it's very hard.
00:05:40
So you hit upon upon the key idea here maybe by accident but it's very important. Quantum mechanics was developed for the theory of small
00:05:50
things. You know, electrons, atoms, you know, things things that are that are the the fundamental constituents of it, but very small. And um you know, if you
00:06:03
take an atom, it's made from electron and a nucleus. You know, classically, they attract each other and they would
00:06:09
just, you know, combine together and then atoms basically would have no size. Why do atoms have size? Okay, that you know that that was one of the the
00:06:22
strange things and it's because this atom is kind of not a a point particle. I used to say to my kids that the electrons were fuzzy. Okay. And and quantum mechanically it has some wave
00:06:34
function and extended. You can think of the electrons being all around the nucleus at the same time. So um it it's
00:06:42
just a very strange behavior u but of small things uh and of course very important as how atoms work and how we describe nature. So quantum mechanics
00:06:54
ultimately became a field that people say is very non-intuitive in terms of understanding where small small particles are, the energy they have, where they're moving to and and
00:07:05
basically we resolved to figuring out that we had to use these functions. It's not just a single point, but it's a distribution. It's a whole bunch of places and there's a probability of
00:07:16
where the atom could be or where the electron could be. It's also a probability of how fast it might be moving. All of these things become
00:07:23
probability functions. And you develop a mathematical theory for doing this that you know takes you
00:07:30
until your third year in university to really know enough math to understand that. But basically that's right
00:07:37
these are forming waves waves of the electron. So you have kind of a wave and electron around the nucleus describing what the uh the electrons are. And these
00:07:49
are kind of like standing waves, you know, it's like hitting a string. Uh, you know, if if different length
00:07:55
strings, different tension strings form different notes, these vibrations of the electrons around the atom can vibrate at
00:08:03
different frequencies. So rather than think about an electron moving around an atom in a predescribed
00:08:10
path and I can know where it is at any point in time, the right way to think about an electron around an atom is it's
00:08:16
in a wave. It's a and it's it's a long there's a wave that describes kind of where it is and it's doing
00:08:23
and you have the electron and you have the proton attracting it. So the whole wave theory
00:08:29
combines all those two and you know gives you a description of how the the atom works and quite accurate
00:08:36
description too. And so one of the other kind of features that arises from the fact that everything at a micro scale is
00:08:44
described by wave functions is that there's a small probability of something kind of extreme or extraordinary
00:08:49
happening. Like the one example is Stephen Hawking figured out that you could have a particle and antiparticle come out of nowhere in the middle of space and the antiarticle goes into the
00:09:00
black hole. The particle shoots off. Yeah. And that the probability of that happening is so low, but it happens
00:09:06
enough that the antiparticle actually starts to delete part of a black hole. And that's how black holes evaporate and
00:09:12
this theory all these interesting things. But can you tell us how what quantum tunneling is? So this is another one of
00:09:18
these sort of features of quantum mechanics that arises from the fact that these things are kind of waves and
00:09:24
probability functions. Yeah. So if if you have um if you have an electron just traveling through space
00:09:31
hitting hitting a wall let's say there's a little wave wave packet wave function
00:09:36
to it. So it's not a single particle. It has some extent to it. And what happens
00:09:42
is that when that particle hits the wall, quantum mechanics say there is some amount small amount of this wave function or if you like the particle going through the wall and then to the
00:09:56
other side. Now most of the time it uh it bounces off but every once in a while it goes
00:10:02
through. And you know this is seen in um uh everyday devices. This is not and as
00:10:09
if you build very small um memory circuit you have to worry about electrons tunneling and charge leaking off your capacitor. Uh they have
00:10:20
magnetic memories that depend on these tunnel junctions. So this is a very well-known phenomenon and if you make
00:10:27
the this barrier this insulator just you know 10 20 atoms thick then that's thin
00:10:34
enough for it to go through to go through. So this is what's so interesting. Um you can actually predict
00:10:40
the number of electrons that might tunnel through one of these barriers one of these insulating barriers as they're called over to the other side which really is crazy to think about. It's
00:10:51
just like walking through walls, right? I mean, yeah, that's that's the idea. Yeah. So, going back to the story you
00:10:56
were sharing, you're in grad school, right? And then Leot proposes this idea. Maybe you can share a little bit more now that
00:11:02
we've got I think a bit of the basics on what was discussed, which was zooming out a bit like rather than just
00:11:08
think about all of this happening at a microscopic scale, is it possible for it to happen at a bigger scale?
00:11:13
Yeah. And again we've been talking about quantum mechanics is the physics nature
00:11:20
at this microscopic atomic scale but the question was if you made a macroscopic object would it obey quantum mechanics also okay and then you know that was the
00:11:32
basic question and it turns out that there's a very natural system to look at looking at an electrical system and look seeing for quantum mechanics an
00:11:44
electrical system where the currents and voltages of essentially electrical oscillator does it behave like a classical physics or does it behave with
00:11:55
this quantum mechanical nature to it? And that was the question. Now it turns out that when you think about quantum
00:12:02
mechanics and thinking about well there's the quantum behavior but then at some point you have to measure it which
00:12:09
then turns it into a probability. There's something called the Schroinger pat cat paradox where um in the paradox
00:12:19
you have your radioactive decay and then you you you let it happen for let's say half of the radioactive decay time and then you say
00:12:29
and then the in you have a ready detected decay a detector and then a bottle of cyanide which will kill a cat
00:12:36
and then do you say you know after some amount of time is the cat in the dead in
00:12:42
the live state. Okay. And you know, physicists, you know, and this is this good question. Einstein brought brought it up or Shoner brought it up. A lot of people uh discussed it. Uh but Alleged
00:12:56
pointed out that the reason this is a paradox is you can believe that a macroscopic object like a cat could be in a quantum superposition state. And in
00:13:06
fact, there was no experime experimental evidence that this could happen. And that was his point. So um so he said well you know people should be testing this and let's see if it's true and uh
00:13:20
as a as a young graduate student who just you know learned about quantum mechanics and it's like oh that's a
00:13:26
really great great question that's something that we should try to do and we should try to do an experiment you
00:13:33
know on on the suggested system uh to look for quantum mechanics. And the the original proposal was looking for the tunneling. Well, it turned out to be more than that, but uh the it look for
00:13:46
tunneling. Let me just kind of describe another way is you know the macroscopic system could
00:13:52
be my entire body. Could I walk through a wall? That's right. And then the probability
00:13:59
of all of my atoms being in the perfect moment, perfect position, you know, to to be able to kind of cross through the wall is so low, it would never happen in this or many other universes of
00:14:11
and and that's the problem is that most macroscopic objects when you try to think about the quantum mechanics that
00:14:18
won't happen. Okay. So, right. There's a small probability one electron can cross over a barrier,
00:14:24
but the probability that many cross over at once is lower and lower and lower and that makes it very difficult to see at
00:14:30
scale. And what what happens is if you look at an electrical circuit then the parameters become favorable for seeing this kind of macroscopic behavior. And
00:14:42
okay, it's hard to go into the the whole physics of all that, but it's basically
00:14:48
because you can make a circuit that operates at microwave frequencies. So instead of you trying to go through the wall once a second, it tries to go through the wall five billion times a
00:14:59
second. Okay. So then it's it's a lot, you know, more you know, you have more chances to go through. And uh uh the
00:15:07
other thing is the just the various parameters that involved in quantum mechanics you know are favorable for
00:15:14
seeing this kind of phenomena. You have to do the experiment right but uh it's favorable for doing that.
00:15:19
So one of the parts of your experiment you created what's called a Josephson junction. Is that is that correct? So this is two superconductors with a barrier between them. Right. I got
00:15:31
really fascinated by superconductors when I was maybe 12 years old. I I went and bought a superc conducting disc etum
00:15:39
berium copper oxide. Yes, that's right. From the back of Popular Science and then I went to UCLA and I got a a jug of
00:15:46
liquid nitrogen and then I floated a magnet above the disc because of the Meisner effect and I had
00:15:52
it at the science fair and I and I did very well with the science fair that year because I showed this really What year was that? Was that when it was
00:15:59
discovered? Must have been 919. Okay. Yeah, that was close enough that that was good. Yeah, the hard part is
00:16:05
getting the liquid nitrogen. But yeah, and I had a friend whose dad was like a doctor at UCLA or something like
00:16:12
that, so he was able to get the liquid nitrogen for our demonstration. Right. Yeah, that that was the hard part. Okay.
00:16:17
I've always been fascinated by the physics of superconductors and maybe you can just explain one of these important
00:16:23
features of the of superconductors as it relates to kind of resistance and current flow and then we can talk about
00:16:28
your experiment. So, so what happens is um when a a material goes superconducting all the electrons condense into one
00:16:40
state. Okay. Now to just to give you analogy of how it's not perfect analogy it's close analogy. If you have a normal metal any metal we have at room temperature it's like a gas of
00:16:53
electrons. It's like you know gas in the air. And then when you get below the superconducting temperature. Sorry, I think we should just explain that. So, so you have a metal all the
00:17:04
electrons are kind of moving around. They're they're perturbed. They're all different energies, different states.
00:17:09
That's right. Different energies, different states. You know, there's some firm statistics. Not go into that, but
00:17:15
it's more or less looks like a gas. You think of a of a gas and then when you cool it below you know a certain
00:17:22
temperature it then coaleses into let's say a solid like like atoms will and the
00:17:30
electrons coales into the something cooper cooper pair bcs condenset is the name where all the electrons are kind of locked together and doing the same
00:17:42
thing. Now the nice thing about that it's not like they're frozen in place but they have a free parameter that allows them all the currents all the electrons to flow in some direction
00:17:55
which is the supercurren in a superconductor meaning a material that's cool enough that it reaches its
00:18:01
superconducting critical temperature. Right? So suddenly all the electrons can still move. They can still create a
00:18:07
current, but but they're they're moving together like they're in like in my analogy like
00:18:13
they're in a solid instead of the gas. And because they're moving together, okay, then then when you work through all the physics, they are not um you
00:18:23
know, they aren't randomly scattering off things. They're just moving together. And then you get a supercurren
00:18:29
where for example if you made a ring a superconductor superconductor that current would basically flow for forever
00:18:35
around the ring. This is what you saw with the floating magnet. Right. That's so interesting. I've
00:18:40
always uh thought and there's obviously been companies started around the idea of creating an infinite battery where
00:18:47
you could store technically forever electricity because the electrons are just moving around. If it's
00:18:52
superconducting it can they can just spin forever around that circuit. And people actually do use big
00:18:58
superconducting magnets to store energy. And when you get an MRI that you're in a
00:19:03
you're in a liquid helium machine with a a superconducting magnet, they charge it
00:19:09
up and that magnetic field is basically there forever. Uh you know, waiting for people to to go inside it. It it's kind of strange to be in you're inside this
00:19:19
super cold magnet there. But they've designed it very well. Works well. So this Josephson junction is two
00:19:26
superconductors. They're on either side of a barrier that you create, an insulating barrier. And then maybe just
00:19:33
explain the experiment and and what you guys measured. And this this was all while you were in
00:19:38
grad school, right? Yeah. Yeah. And and uh and this is this Jose junction because the Cooper pairs
00:19:45
have to tunnel through it, but they kind of tunnel through it together without any loss. This this actually forms
00:19:53
what's called an electrical inductor in circuit in circuits. So an inductor is normally a a coil of wire that stores energy and its magnetic field. Here this
00:20:05
this just stores energy of the electrons tunneling through here. And so it's a it's something called we call a kinetic
00:20:11
inductance and it happens with this but that forms a nonlinear inductance and with a capacitor in the circuit that forms an inductor capacitance resonance
00:20:24
circuit which is in your old which is like in your radios you have filters of LC resonance circuits to filter your signal and do anything. So this is a very common microwave and uh you know
00:20:38
radio frequency uh element that you use all the time to make electrical circuits. So I just want to simplify that you have these two superconductors split by this barrier. There's some tunneling some of
00:20:50
these electrons are actually going through the barrier to the other side and then you can effectively measure all
00:20:57
of these different changes as you change the temperature. You guys were putting different voltage states into this
00:21:02
circuit that you built. And what you saw and what you measured and what you demonstrated was that there were these
00:21:09
very kind of discrete or specific changes that happened that basically demonstrated quantum mechanics at scale. That's right. So, so this inductor
00:21:20
capacitor resonator which you just treat as a you is a charge and a current going
00:21:26
through but because it's quantum mechanics there's this wave function to it. So there's some uncertainty in these
00:21:34
and then given just the way that the simple electrical circuit works um uh you can then demonstrate the quantum mechanics one of the tunneling which is a little bit hard to describe here but
00:21:46
you can see tunneling but I think the little bit easier thing maybe easier is to look at the energy levels of this and let me kind of explain that when people
00:21:59
discovered you know atomic physics and started doing any doing this they um excited a gas of of you know some gas and the light coming out of that gas
00:22:13
would be at certain colors of frequency. So if you go outside and you have the sodium lamps on, these are kind of the
00:22:20
yellow lamps, you have, you know, kind of a single frequency coming out of that lamp. Or nowadays you look at LEDs,
00:22:27
there are certain frequencies that come out of that. And this is a quantum mechanical effect that the how the electrons travel around the atom.
00:22:39
There's only certain kind of frequencies that they oscillate at. Now, classically, you would expect there to be all different frequencies that it spirals around or spirals into the
00:22:51
nucleus. So, that's what you expect. But we saw these discrete frequencies. And so, by measuring those discrete frequencies, you now had proof that there was quantum mechanics
00:23:04
happening at a macro scale. That That's right. And you published this work. And was
00:23:11
there a lot of attention when you published this work? This was in 1985 86. Yeah. 85 or I actually forget but 85 or 86. And so was there much attention on this
00:23:23
work at the time? 8. Yeah. This was a big question and people wanted to you know understand that and you know we published it in physical review letters and it got a lot of attention and I
00:23:36
think we had a little article in Scientific American that was very proud of that wrote about that and uh yeah it it was you know it was kind of a kind of a
00:23:47
big deal. What did you go on to do at that point? Was it considered groundbreaking Nobel Prize-winning work and what was the
00:23:54
story at that time when this came out? Yeah. So, you know, it was an it was an important piece of work and people noticed it, but you know, it it you
00:24:06
know, we we showed that quantum mechanics worked and quantum mechanics worked on the macro scale, which was
00:24:11
nice, but one could still, you know, argue, well, what is it good for? What are you going to do? And the in fact the
00:24:19
secret of an important scientific breakthrough is does it lead to other experiments and
00:24:26
other papers and other inventions and the like and uh that kind of took uh you know many decades to happen because it was so new and people had to do do that.
00:24:38
So I would say it was noteworthy at the time but you know not necessarily you know something for a Nobel Prize because it was just kind of you know weird and went off and you know what are you going
00:24:50
to do with it? But what happened at the time was very interesting and at the end of my thesis
00:24:58
time there was a conference in uh UC Santa Barbara where I came here for the first time. Yeah. and uh they they were talking about this experiment but the very last
00:25:10
day the last talk was by Richard Feman very well-known physicist of course the greatest yeah the great yeah right you know I kind of idolized him and and read his his his
00:25:24
books and whatever and he was talking about using quantum mechanics for computation which is
00:25:32
building a quantum computer so he gave a talk that was, you know, really kind of amazing. I'm going to be honest as a student. I I didn't quite catch everything and my Michelle dev my
00:25:45
dear friend said yeah maybe some of the things wasn't quite figured out at the time but afterwards he was absolutely
00:25:54
mobbed by people asking him questions cuz it's so interesting to think about taking this this you know basic law and actually doing computation with it
00:26:04
right and I was a graduate student so I was kind of at the outside ring you know you
00:26:10
have the professor professors in close and whatever and I was just a lowly graduate student so I could hear a
00:26:16
little bit but what I what I learned from this it was a great question and and something that would be kind of worth doing you know for your your life pro your life work because it's so deep
00:26:29
and so interesting and maybe practical and the like so that really motivated me yeah so that big idea is to use quantum mechanics and these properties of
00:26:42
quantum mechanics to do computing. Yeah, that's right. And and I would say uh uh soon after that other people in the field got a little bit more specific
00:26:52
and showed how you would how you would do it. And then it was in the early 1990s, maybe 5 years later, that Peter
00:27:01
Shaw came up with this factoring algorithm to to solve a you know, a real world problem with it.
00:27:07
Yeah. And it took a while to people figure out. It was very abstract and you know people quite weren't sure what to
00:27:13
do. But but like I said I could see that in all the the crowd around Fineman asking them questions that this was the most you know most interesting
00:27:23
fundamental question you know how to combine quantum mechanics with doing computation. It's it's really amazing.
00:27:31
And so you started to do that with your life's work pretty much. you go on to a very good career. Yeah. So my career path um was of course
00:27:42
quantum computing was getting developed and and it took me a while to really get
00:27:48
go all in on it. Okay. Yeah. So um what happened is Michelle Devare was was from France from CA
00:27:56
France went to Berkeley went back I went there as a posttock and worked with them
00:28:02
and they were young and unknown at the time and people like well you're going to go to Europe and you're not going to
00:28:08
get connected to US science but I knew Michelle and Danielle Eststev and Christian Abino the people I working with were absolutely brilliant okay and
00:28:18
they've had a very illustrious a career. So I went over there because I knew that
00:28:23
was great. And we continued to do experiments on this. Yeah. And then after that I came back to the
00:28:29
US and I worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And it turns out just down the hall from Dave Wland and his group who went a Nobel Prize for atomic physics for you
00:28:42
know doing quantum computation. And I worked on some with doing experiments on counting electrons and working for
00:28:49
metrology and then did other experiments. And then in late uh the '9s I I just again went all in on building a quantum computer. There was funding available at that time. It had
00:29:03
progressed enough theoretically that the US government started you know funding this to see if people can do it. And so then couple years after 2014 I think you
00:29:16
ended up at at Google's quantum lab in Santa Barbara. Is that right? I was at UCSB for um 10 years or so
00:29:23
which was wonderful and built up the lab to go from very basic things to building
00:29:28
a five and then 9 cubit quantum computer. And then during that time, Google got interested and I I kind of
00:29:36
decided that although academia was great, it would be hard to get the team together and keep them together for a long time to build this complicated machine and Google had the money. Okay.
00:29:49
Yeah. So, so we went there and we started off fairly small uh mostly from people coming from my UCSB group and then in uh 2019
00:30:00
we published this quantum supremacy experiment with 53 cubits where we made a lot of cubits and we made them really good and you know fast and whatever so
00:30:13
that we could run some algorithm a mathematical algorithm that um what it produced some output uh that was took you know much much longer on a classical
00:30:27
computer to to emulate and do that. It was not practical but it was a demonstration of the power of a quantum computer that it worked. Well, just maybe give
00:30:38
your description of a cubit and maybe we can relate, you know, how do we build these quantum computers from cubits to the Josephson junction and some of the early work you had done that you ended
00:30:50
up winning the prize for. So very simply, we have a metal wire and a metal wire that gets put together on this Joseen junction which represents a
00:31:02
a an inductor flowing through here. And then from this wire to this wire, we have a capacitor.
00:31:09
And then we set that up to oscillate at about 5 GHz cell phone frequencies. Uh uh you know to to form the cubit. Okay, this oscillating thing. And then
00:31:22
there's at low temperatures superconductors you know all this magic we can we can get quantum mechanical
00:31:29
behavior out of that and then you can measure that quantum mechanical behavior create a
00:31:34
representation and use that to run your computing. That's right. What you can do is you put on microwave pulses to change the state
00:31:42
of the quantum computer, change the way it oscillates and then we connect it to um it's a complicated readout circuitry uh to you know in the end figure out
00:31:54
what state it's in. Okay. And then and then you you connect just an array of these and you just use capacitive coupling from you know one
00:32:05
one wire to the to the next one to to couple them together and it's more complicated than that but that gives you a good idea and then just to understand
00:32:16
your work that you won this Nobel Prize for that demonstrated this quantum mechanical phenomena at scale. Is that part of the design of a cubit and the
00:32:28
circuitry? Did that inform that design work or explain it rather? Yeah. Yeah. It was the very basic simplest
00:32:35
circuit. uh you know we were using analog simulators at the time not even the I took data with a computer but this is this is far back enough that you know
00:32:46
it was very rudimentary and then over the years we just got more sophisticated design by the whole field
00:32:54
you know many many people and uh and we were able to put things together in a way to actually build a
00:33:01
computer now right the the I would say the reason why It's interesting from the Nobel Prize thing
00:33:09
is what it led to and what it led to right now is a thousand maybe several thousand people around the world doing research to build this superconducting
00:33:22
quantum computer and and it's just turned into enormous field large number of papers large number of people people
00:33:30
selling quantum computers IBM is selling quantum computers people are selling time in the quantum computers and the
00:33:37
fact that it was a it was a useful idea okay that led and and and brought into form uh uh all all these different experiments ideas and many many people
00:33:48
contributed this I mean it's very interesting and I think just this broad question or observation
00:33:55
that sometimes inquisitive minds leads to research that leads to some set of discovery that are completely not
00:34:06
apparent until 40 years later. the effect or the impact it may have had on building an industrial field like
00:34:12
there's now quantum computing everyone feels is on the brink of actually achieving what people have
00:34:19
talked about in theory for decades but seems to be getting very close to doing it and yeah I I can talk on that but I would
00:34:25
say um you know this field many other ideas on how to build a quantum computer has been generated and uh it is very
00:34:36
exciting field quite large field and I would say that the science was very very deep too. To get these things to work you have to invent lots of different devices. You have to think about
00:34:49
materials. You have to fabricate it, build complex control systems. Engineering and physics is is to me quite beautiful. And and just to tell
00:34:59
you a little bit about me, um you know, I grew up building things and as an experimentalist,
00:35:05
you know, I like to to build instruments, you know, build experiments to show this. And this was kind of the
00:35:11
ideal project for me because, you know, from very early on it was like, well, let's, you know, do this great physics, but let's also build something. And by saying, well, what do we have to do to
00:35:24
build a quantum computer? that kind of led me to know what physics we have to test and what are the kinds of things we
00:35:31
have to build and that's just the way my mind works. I'm I'm much more practically oriented. So it was a
00:35:37
perfect field for me to get in and that's kind of what you know intuitively led me to you know want to do this in
00:35:43
graduate school. And I think it's just so fascinating the amount of engineering and technology you have to do to make this work. Where are we in quantum computing
00:35:54
evolution today? So what's the state? At what point will we have call it generally accessible and generally useful quantum computers that can do all of the amazing things everyone's kind of
00:36:06
talked about for decades that one would be able to do quantum computers. That's right. So um right now we're
00:36:13
we're about 50 or 100 cubits for the superconducting case but they they can be fully controlled and run real algorithms and do very complicated things. They have a lot of other systems
00:36:26
that can do that. I think the the newcomer on the block which looks good is neutral atoms where they've made big
00:36:33
neutral atom systems but they they're still working to get the gates controlled really well and the like. But what's happened right now is we can run
00:36:44
genuine algorithms on that and people have uh h you know have ideas they want to run but because these cubits are not perfect okay you it's an analog control
00:36:57
system and fundamentally these quantum bits have a little bit of error to it little bit of noise to it you can only run so complicated of a project and it's
00:37:09
good enough to write scientific papers and try things out. Uh, every once in a while people say they've done something uh, you know, that's hard to compute and
00:37:20
well that's fine, but they aren't really big enough to be useful yet. They have to get bigger and they have to get better, less noise. Do you have a point of view on the timelines? This is everyone's
00:37:32
speculation and there's been more hype than reality. Yeah, there's more hype than reality and and uh, and it's hard. I used to not
00:37:39
want to speculate that but since I started a company then I can do that and what we want to do and it's a timeline of many other groups is to do something
00:37:51
in let's say in the next 8 10 years something like that but the problem is you know people are predicting 10 years
00:37:58
you know for a while now so okay we we have to do that but um I can tell you for what we're doing is that we've identified by what are kind of the
00:38:10
technology bottlenecks of the current fabric turn ways to make a a quantum computer. We've written some papers on it and you know we're working with people in the semiconductor industry to
00:38:24
manufacture this in a much more coste effective quality way you know the way you make these GPUs or something and we think uh you know when we get that to
00:38:35
work we can scale up very rapidly so in in a let's say 10year time scale something like that in a lot of technically difficult fields like fusion energy perhaps even quantum
00:38:48
computing. They are seeing profound acceleration in getting to their crazy big goals on
00:38:54
these very big technical projects because of AI. Is AI starting to play a role in solving some of the engineering,
00:39:02
material science, scaling, noise issues that we've seen historically in quantum computing? And do you think that there's an acceleration underway in performance improvements because of AI? there there
00:39:13
may be um my partic and and and there's things we can maybe do modeling and the like. We also think what we can do is use the quantum computer and AI together
00:39:26
to solve the problems better. So that that that's what our theory team is proposing. I used to work with Google
00:39:34
quantum AI. That's what they're proposing. So there's a general feeling of that. My particular view though is
00:39:41
that in terms of this control, if you don't build your system cleanly enough and you know that the control is clear enough, uh you're you're not going to
00:39:53
get the the great performance out of it. So I'm a little bit old school here and
00:39:58
and working on you know building it that way. There's certainly some elements where you can use AI,
00:40:05
you know, in the decoding circuit for the the error correction and the like. But the one thing to mention to you is
00:40:12
that, you know, these cubits are are naturally very noisy and you can maybe do sometimes 100 for bad cubits and maybe a thousand maybe few thousand
00:40:25
operations before they kind of lose their memory. You know, you can think of it as like dynamic RAM where you have to
00:40:32
refresh it. Well, you have to refresh it with error correction. And because of that, you're talking about a million
00:40:38
cubit quantum computers to be general purpose and solve really hard problems. There might be some a million something. A million is a good round number for it. Maybe a little bit
00:40:49
more. And right now we're at you know a hundred or you know a little bit more than that. So we have a ways to go.
00:40:56
What is your view on China and the progress that they're making in this technology versus the US? This is the
00:41:03
topic dour in every field, industrial field, computing, science is where's China at compared to the US, the comparisons and everyone's worried about the progress in China versus the US and
00:41:15
what that means. So I can talk about my own field but when I have read the papers that um duplicated what we did at at Google on the quantum supremacy
00:41:28
experiment you know they know what they're doing. I mean they they go through the theory they talk about a lot
00:41:34
of it is very similar to what we're doing but they know what they're doing and they're getting great results. And
00:41:41
the thing that scares me a little bit is, you know, last December the Google group published the latest results, which is really much nicer. They made some real improvement, but then China
00:41:54
soon afterward published something kind of indicating they were, you know, on par or near par or something to it. And, you know, I'm worried that the the
00:42:05
Chinese government is saying, well, you can't publish anything until it's in the Western press. and then you can, you
00:42:11
know, then it's open and you can talk about it. That's precisely what I've heard. And so, yeah. So, so uh, you know, I I'm I'm a
00:42:18
I'm a little bit uh concerned about that. Now, what we're doing with our our company is we're doing a new generation of fabrication of the devices. And I
00:42:32
would cons consider in my my my research we had the simple fabrication with the original papers in 85 and then around 2000 we had more sophisticated
00:42:43
fabrication and then for the quantum supremacy experiment we did something even more complicated other groups too but we want to do a similar jump in the
00:42:53
fabrication and what's interesting about this is we're going to be using applied
00:43:00
materials and the modern fabrication processes that they have which on 300 mm tools you know you can't get in China for example you can get it for camos and then
00:43:14
they're developing we're developing standard processes but you know new recipes and new ways to put it together
00:43:22
and we think by doing that we can do a huge leaprog and then get there faster and get there in a way that you know will protect our lead. There's other things we're doing too. Uh and you know
00:43:35
that that's a small part of it, but uh you know we think there's a way to um you know really lead the field and uh and we're happy we have good industrial partners of uh applied materials
00:43:48
synopsis design tools Hula Packard Enterprise some startups who do the theory work. Uh so you know we have a good consortium and we want to use all
00:44:00
that knowledge and expertise of engineering to make this happen. Where were you when you got the news
00:44:06
this week that you won the Nobel Prize and how surprised were you because this is a 40year-old
00:44:12
research effort. Had anyone giving you a call rumor gossip mill saying, "Hey, you're on the list this year potentially
00:44:18
being considered." So let me uh give you a little bit of the inside story. Um you know if you we
00:44:25
we've known that this was a important experiment from the beginning. we've obtained some other prizes that are you
00:44:32
know much less wellknown and really appreciative of all that and you you what happens is the Nobel um um system uh put together Nobel symposiums where
00:44:46
they get together physicists in a certain field which is quantum information and this kind of thing and
00:44:53
they they give uh have all the scientists give talks and and they want to kind of check on the vi vitality of
00:45:00
the you know of the field, how big is it? And then you know also maybe some of the the leaders that maybe think about it, you know, can they give a good talk? Would they good be a good representative?
00:45:12
So um Michelle and John and I have been to these uh symposiums before and we kind of knew, you know, what was going on, you know, that at least we were considered. And but I I'll just tell you
00:45:25
as a scientist just to be invited to these and be considered is a is a fantastic honor, you know, and and having getting the prize is just so kind
00:45:38
of unbelievable that you shouldn't think that way. So, you know, I've known about it for a few years. And in fact, to be
00:45:45
very honest, in the past when the dates have come around, it's like, oh, is this going to happen? And then you wake up in
00:45:52
the morning and it's like, "Oh, it didn't happen." And you're kind of down for a day. You know, it didn't happen
00:45:59
this year. And that's a very bad attitude. I I don't like that at all. And, you know, you you should not covet
00:46:05
some, you know, insanely difficult uh prize that, you know, only only goes to a few people. So, what happened this year is I kind of worked through this over several years and this year I just
00:46:19
kind of forgot about it. Okay. So, I went to bed and then uh and then uh we got the call at 3:00 and my wife answered the phone and found out what happened. But um she didn't wake me up
00:46:32
right away because she knew if the day was going to be hectic and I needed my sleep to not be grumpy. That
00:46:38
was nice of her. Don't want to be grumpy talking it. So, she woke me up at 5:30 and
00:46:44
you know, as I looked at the computer, oh my god. you know, and then we had some reporters coming over at 6
00:46:50
which, you know, interviewed me, you know, right when I had found out, half hour after I'd found out.
00:46:56
And it's it's a it's it's great. It's it's a great honor and uh it's just been really fun. And then, you know, I've been getting a lot of emails from people I've worked with or students I've had in
00:47:08
the past congratulating me and you exchange little stories and the like. and it's it's it's kind of a very special time. That's great. Any um science or
00:47:20
technology fields that you've been following outside of your core discipline that you think are really
00:47:28
exciting. I always like to hear what major kind of thinkers to be honest. I'm just so focused on
00:47:36
doing this and especially when you start a company, you better be focused, right?
00:47:41
So, I'm doing that. But one of the fields that I find, this is someone Ben Mazen at UC Santa Barbara is looking for
00:47:50
exoplanets and they're using superconducting detectors that are somewhat similar to
00:47:57
what we're doing. In fact, in the 1990s or so, I helped, you know, helped establish that field with other people and did that for five, six, seven years
00:48:10
uh to do that. but he's doing it in a different way. And I really like how, you know, this instrumentation, you
00:48:17
know, that we've been working on is their quantum devices are are now able to um uh do these astronomy
00:48:25
uh detectors and and look for look for these. And of course, there's so much going on in astronomy these way days
00:48:32
with gravitational detectors and exoplanet searches and it it it's just really fascinating to me. And again it's very much technologyoriented where people are building good detectors. This
00:48:45
is what I like. Okay. I like building building instruments. So that that's particularly interest.
00:48:52
Yeah, that's great. I mean very exciting field and hopefully will develop quantum
00:48:58
computers that will help us build materials and technology to help us get there one day. So that's right. Many rungs on the ladder of human progress. Well, congratulations again on
00:49:10
winning the Nobel Prize in physics this year. Very welld deserved. It's a fantastic moment. Enjoy it. Enjoy the
00:49:16
ceremony and we're excited for your continued work in the field of material quantum computing. And thank you. Yeah. And thank you. I really enjoyed the questions and the flow where you
00:49:28
were asking questions to explain it at the right level for people. And uh I I I really appreciate that. This is a great great podcast. Great. Thank you.
00:49:42
[Music] I'm going all in.